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"That feeling. That's the real difference in a life. People who live on solid ground, underneath safe skies, know nothing of this; they are like the English POWs in Dresden who continued to pour tea and dress for dinner, even as the alarms went off, even as the city became a towering ball of fire. Born of a green and pleasant land, a temperate land, the English have a basic inability to conceive of disaster, even when it is man-made."
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Exlpore more Disaster quotes
"If I could learn to treat triumph and disaster the same, then I would find bliss."
"First, those images help us understand the general and specific magnitude of disaster caused by the tsunami. The huge outpouring of aid would not have happened without those images."
"The biggest stories in 2005 were the national disasters."
"There are no quick fixes to Indigenous poverty and social disaster."
"Unlike most major American cities, Honolulu is geographically insulated from the rest of the country. When disaster strikes we cannot call on neighboring states for assistance."
"There is no sense in doing a wonderful script with somebody who can't direct because that is a disaster."
"It never occurred to me that we would have as grandiose a program as the Marshall Plan, but I felt that we had to do something to save Europe from economic disaster which would encourage the Communist takeover."
"It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster."
Explore more quotes by Zadie Smith
"Now, how do the young prepare to meet the old? The same way the old prepare to meet the young: with a little condescension; with low expectation of the other's rationality; with the knowledge that the other will find what they say hard to understand, that it will go beyond them (not so much over the head as between the legs); and with the feeling that they must arrive with something the other will like, something suitable."
"Jerome said, It's like, a family doesn't work anymore when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone, You know?"
"Four months in the life of a seventeen-year-old is the stuff of swings and roundabouts, ... Never again in your life do you possess the capacity for such total personality overhaul."
"They were real people who entertained and argued and existed entirely independently from him, although he had set the thing in motion. They had different thoughts and beliefs. ~ on children growing up."
"To her credit, though, Trace didn't lose her famous temper, not at that moment. At eighteen she was already expert at the older woman's art of fermenting rage, conserving it, for later use."
"It's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe."
"Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied."
"Mothers are urgently trying to tell something to their daughters, and this urgency is precisely what repels their daughters, forcing them to turn away. Mothers are left stranded, madly holding a lump of London clay, some grass, some white tubers, a dandelion, a fat worm passing the world through itself."
"By Allah, how _thankful_ he is (_yes, madam, one moment, madam_), how _gladdened_ by the thought that Magid, Magid at least, will, in a matter of four hours, be flying east from this place and its demands, its constant cravings, this place where there exists neither patience nor pity, where the people want what they want _now_, right now (_We've been waiting twenty minutes for the vegetables_), expecting their lovers, their children, their friends, and even their gods to arrive at little cost and in little time, just as table ten expect their tandoori prawns. . . ."
"There was an inevitability about the road towards each other which encouraged meandering along the route."
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